Help the president keep his promise

On September 9th, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress. In that address, he promised the American people the health care plan would not have public funding for abortion, as Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak reminded us in his recent USA Today op-ed.

Cardinal Francis George and Archbishop Charles Chaput are reminding us, too, among other US bishops. George told an interviewer the president’s party is doing him no favor by drafting and presenting legislation that breaks his promise on so critical and pivotal an issue as abortion funding. Chaput is telling readers (and members of the Denver Archdiocese this weekend) that President Obama needs our help keeping that promise.

But he notes a minor detail that could be the wild card in the president playing his final hand on health care legislation.

Eight weeks ago President Obama promised a joint session of Congress that “his” health-care plan would not include or provide public monies for abortion.  This seemed persuasive because it made sense.  As polling has shown, most Americans do not want abortion or its funding included in any publicly supported health plan.

So far, no health care reform plan can be called “his”.

Eight weeks later, there is no “president’s” plan.  Instead, as of Nov. 1, Congress has produced five different proposals, including a merged House version totaling nearly 2,000 pages of complex and sweeping legislation.  Few citizens have actually read the text.  Even fewer really understand its implications.  But all of the proposals have one thing in common:  Not one of them lives up to the president’s promise.

The bishops have plenty of experience and expertise in addressing health care needs, including the need to re-tool what we’ve had, for a long time.

Let’s remember that America’s Catholic bishops have pushed for national health-care reform for decades, long before our mass media discovered it as a theme.  The Church regards access to basic health-care services as a right, not a privilege.  But to be legitimate, reform efforts need to respect the dignity of the whole human person from conception to natural death.  That includes the unborn child, the immigrant and the elderly.  Genuine reform also demands strong protections for the conscience rights of medical professionals and institutions.  And it also requires that our ideals rest on a foundation of sound reasoning.

And the “common good”, which is brought up a lot by both the Church, and the administration.

Since August, the U.S. bishops and their staff have worked tirelessly with members of Congress and the White House staff, trying to craft mutually acceptable health-care legislation.  The Church in the United States wants to find the common ground that would enable Catholics to support Congress and the White House in ensuring access to basic health services for all our people.  But every effort by concerned members of Congress to ensure morally acceptable legislation — despite the outstanding leadership of Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak — has been rebuffed, often with the kind of political doubletalk that seems deliberately designed to confuse.

Here’s the result.  On Oct. 28, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George and other leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced that all efforts to adequately revise current health-care proposals have failed.  In other words, not one of the current legislative proposals offers legitimate “common ground” on the issues vital to Catholics.  And to date, despite the president’s original promise, the White House has done nothing to fix that problem.

To put it bluntly:  all of the health-care reform solutions currently facing Congress violate human dignity in potentially grievous ways.  Unless these proposals are immediately changed to reflect the concerns of Congressman Stupak, other like-minded members of Congress, and leaders of the national Catholic community, Catholics need to vigorously oppose and help defeat this dangerous legislation.

Cardinal George has called the abortion funding mandate “a deal breaker”. Period. So have some Democrats.

Help the president and Congress make the deal right, and reform the ‘reform’. It’s about to be voted on in the House. Stop the abortion mandate, for goodness sake.